Elements of Visual Media A Collection of Several Assignments
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Garrett Chase
Elements of Visual Media: A Collection of Several Assignments By: Garrett Chase Copyright Š 2014 Garrett Chase All rights reserved. All photographic images in this book were made by the author photographing real things in the real world with a real camera. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any mechanical or electronic means without written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
In Partial Fulfillment of PHAR.204.01 - Elements of Visual Media at Rochester Institute of Technology
Author’s Notes on Elements of Visual Media This course has added so much to my skillset as a contemporary artist and designer. I have utilized much of what we have learned in professional and personal projects. In terms of 2D design, my skills were limited to a surface level knowledge of Adobe Illustrator. I now know how to use Illustrator extensively as well as its publishing counterpart, InDesign. My added skills in InDesign will help me as I make a career shift towards professional book printing. Being able to add motion graphics to my list of software capabilities is in-disposable as well. The moving media world is an optimum way of both branding oneself and conveying a message to a large demographic. Overall, Elements of Visual Media has become a quintessential stepping stone in my progression as a professional. This book is the final piece in confirming my mastery of the course material.
Assignment 1 : Arranging Type and Imagery The assignment was to create an attractive multi-page layout for Beatrice Ward’s “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible”. The layout should incorporate both imagery and type and be organized in a legible format.
The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible Beatrice Warde
The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible* by Beatrice Warde (1900 -- 1969)
Imagine that you have before you a flagon of wine. You may choose your own favourite vintage for this imaginary demonstration, so that it be a deep shimmering crimson in color. You have two goblets before you. One is of solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns. The other is of crystal-clear glass, thin as a bubble, and as transparent. Pour and drink; and according to your choice of goblet, I shall know whether or not you are a connoisseur of wine. For if you have no feelings about wine one way or the other, you will want the sensation of drinking the stuff out of a vessel that may have cost thousands of pounds; but if you are a member of that vanishing tribe, the amateurs of fine vintages, you will choose the crystal, because everything about it is calculated to reveal rather than hide the beautiful thing which it was meant to contain. Bear with me in this long-winded and fragrant metaphor; for you will find that almost all the virtues of the perfect wine-glass have a parallel in typography. There is the long, thin stem that obviates fingerprints on the bowl. Why? Because no cloud must come between your eyes and the fiery heart of the liquid. Are not the margins on book pages similarly meant to obviate the necessity of fingering the type-page? Again: the glass is colorless or at the most only faintly tinged in the bowl, because the connoisseur judges wine partly by its color and is impatient of anything that alters it. There are a thousand mannerisms in typography that are as impudent and arbitrary as putting port in tumblers of red or green glass! When a goblet has a base that looks too small for security, it does not matter how cleverly it is weighted; you feel nervous lest it should tip over. There are ways of setting lines of type which may work well enough, and yet keep the reader subconsciously worried by the fear of ‘doubling’ lines, reading three words as one, and so forth. Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a ‘modernist’ in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first thing he asked of his particular object was not ‘How should it look?’ but ‘What must it do?’ and to that extent all good typography is modernist.
Wine is so strange and potent a thing that it has been used in the central ritual of religion in one place and time, and attacked by a virago with a hatchet in another. There is only one thing in the world that is capable of stirring and altering men’s minds to the same extent, and that is the coherent expression of thought. That is man’s chief miracle, unique to man. There is no ‘explanation’ whatever of the fact that I can make arbitrary sounds which will lead a total stranger to think my own thought. It is sheer magic that I should be able to hold a one-sided conversation by means of black marks on paper with an unknown person half-way across the world. Talking, broadcasting, writing, and printing are all quite literally forms of thought transference, and it is the ability and eagerness to transfer and receive the contents of the mind that is almost alone responsible for human civilization. If you agree with this, you will agree with my one main idea, i.e. that the most important thing about printing is that it conveys thought, ideas, images, from one mind to other minds. This statement is what you might call the front door of the science of typography. Within lie hundreds of rooms; but unless you start by assuming that printing is meant to convey specific and coherent ideas, it is very easy to find yourself in the wrong house altogether. Before asking what this statement leads to, let us see what it does not necessarily lead to. If books are printed in order to be read, we must distinguish readability from what the optician would call legibility. A page set in 14-pt Bold Sans is, according to the laboratory tests, more ‘legible’ than one set in 11-pt Baskerville. A public speaker is more ‘audible’ in that sense when he bellows. But a good speaking voice is one which is inaudible as a voice. It is the transparent goblet again! I need not warn you that if you begin listening to the inflections and speaking rhythms of a voice from a platform, you are falling asleep. When you listen to a song in a language you do not understand, part of your mind actually does fall asleep, leaving your quite separate aesthetic sensibilities to enjoy themselves unimpeded by your reasoning faculties.
The fine arts do that; but that is not the purpose of printing. Type well used is invisible as type, just as the perfect talking voice is the unnoticed vehicle for the transmission of words, ideas. We may say, therefore, that printing may be delightful for many reasons, but that it is important, first and foremost, as a means of doing something. That is why it is mischievous to call any printed piece a work of art, especially fine art: because that would imply that its first purpose was to exist as an expression of beauty for its own sake and for the delectation of the senses. Calligraphy can almost be considered a fine art nowadays, because its primary economic and educational purpose has been taken away; but printing in English will not qualify as an art until the present English language no longer conveys ideas to future generations, and until printing itself hands its usefulness to some yet unimagined successor. There is no end to the maze of practices in typography, and this idea of printing as a conveyor is, at least in the minds of all the great typographers with whom I have had the privilege of talking, the one clue that can guide you through the maze. Without this essential humility of mind, I have seen ardent designers go more hopelessly wrong, make more ludicrous mistakes out of an excessive enthusiasm, than I could have thought possible. And with this clue, this purposiveness in the back of your mind, it is possible to do the most unheard-of things, and find that they justify you triumphantly. It is not a waste of time to go to the simple fundamentals and reason from them. In the flurry of your individual problems, I think you will not mind spending half an hour on one broad and simple set of ideas involving abstract principles. I once was talking to a man who designed a very pleasing advertising type which undoubtedly all of you have used. I said something about what artists think about a certain problem, and he replied with a beautiful gesture: ‘Ah, madam, we artists do not think---we feel!’ That same day I quoted that remark to another designer of my acquaintance, and he, being less poetically inclined, murmured: ‘I’m not feeling very well today, I think!’ He was right, he did think; he was the thinking sort; and that is why he is not so good a painter, and to my mind ten times better as a typographer and type designer than the man who instinctively avoided anything as coherent as a reason. I always suspect the typographic enthusiast
who takes a printed page from a book and frames it to hang on the wall, for I believe that in order to gratify a sensory delight he has mutilated something infinitely more important. I remember that T.M. Cleland, the famous American typographer, once showed me a very beautiful layout for a Cadillac booklet involving decorations in color. He did not have the actual text to work with in drawing up his specimen pages, so he had set the lines in Latin. This was not only for the reason that you will all think of; if you have seen the old typefoundries’ famous Quousque Tandem copy (i.e. that Latin has few descenders and thus gives a remarkably even line). No, he told me that originally he had set up the dullest ‘wording’ that he could find (I dare say it was from Hansard), and yet he discovered that the man to whom he submitted it would start reading and making comments on the text. I made some remark on the mentality of Boards of Directors, but Mr. Cleland said, ‘No: you’re wrong; if the reader had not been practically forced to read---if he had not seen those words suddenly imbued with glamour and significance---then the layout would have been a failure. Setting it in Italian or Latin is only an easy way of saying “This is not the text as it will appear”.’ Let me start my specific conclusions with book typography, because that contains all the fundamentals, and then go on to a few points about advertising. The book typographer has the job of erecting a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author’s words. He may put up a stained-glass window of marvelous beauty, but a failure as a window; that is, he may use some rich superb type like text gothic that is something to be looked at, not through. Or he may work in what I call transparent or invisible typography. I have a book at home, of which I have no visual recollection whatever as far as its typography goes; when I think of it, all I see is the Three Musketeers and their comrades swaggering up and down the streets of Paris. The third type of window is one in which the glass is broken into relatively small leaded panes; and this corresponds to what is called ‘fine printing’ today, in that you are at least conscious that there is a window there, and that someone has enjoyed building it. That is not objectionable, because of a very important fact which has to do with the psychology of the subconscious mind. That is that the mental eye focuses through type and not upon it. The type which, through any arbitrary warping of design or excess of ‘color’, gets in
the way of the mental picture to be conveyed, is a bad type. Our subconscious is always afraid of blunders (which illogical setting, tight spacing and too-wide unleaded lines can trick us into), of boredom, and of officiousness. The running headline that keeps shouting at us, the line that looks like one long word, the capitals jammed together without hair-spaces--these mean subconscious squinting and loss of mental focus.
*From WikiPedia: “The Crystal Goblet” is an essay on typography by Beatrice Warde.
And if what I have said is true of book printing, even of the most exquisite limited editions, it is fifty times more obvious in advertising, where the one and only justification for the purchase of space is that you are conveying a message---that you are implanting a desire, straight into the mind of the reader. It is tragically easy to throw away half the reader-interest of an advertisement by setting the simple and compelling argument in a face which is uncomfortably alien to the classic reasonableness of the book-face. Get attention as you will by your headline, and make any pretty type pictures you like if you are sure that the copy is useless as a means of selling goods; but if you are happy enough to have really good copy to work with, I beg you to remember that thousands of people pay hard-earned money for the privilege of reading quietly set book-pages, and that only your wildest ingenuity can stop people from reading a really interesting text.
The essay was first delivered as a speech, called “Printing Should Be Invisible,” given to the British Typographers’ Guild at the St Bride Institute in London, on October 7, 1930. The essay is notable historically as a call for increased clarity in printing and typography. It is now significant as a common reading in the study of typography and graphic design. The essay has been reprinted many times and is a touchstone for the concept of “clear” typography and the straightforward presentation of content. Days after her 1930 address, the lecture appeared in a newsletter called the British & Colonial Printer & Stationer. It was printed again as a pamphlet in 1932 and 1937. Thenceforward, it appeared as either “The Crystal Goblet” or “The Crystal Goblet, or Printing Should Be Invisible.” In 1955 it was published again and reached its widest audience yet in a book called The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography. “The Crystal Goblet” is rich with metaphors. The title itself is a reference to a clear vessel holding wine, where the vessel, the printed word, gives
Printing demands a humility of mind, for the lack of which many of the fine arts are even now floundering in self-conscious and maudlin experiments. There is nothing simple or dull in achieving the transparent page. Vulgar ostentation is twice as easy as discipline. When you realise that ugly typography never effaces itself; you will be able to capture beauty as the wise men capture happiness by aiming at something else. The ‘stunt typographer’ learns the fickleness of rich men who hate to read. Not for them are long breaths held over serif and kern, they will not appreciate your splitting of hair-spaces. Nobody (save the other craftsmen) will appreciate half your skill. But you may spend endless years of happy experiment in devising that crystalline goblet which is worthy to hold the vintage of the human mind.
no obstruction to the presentation of its content, the text. Warde poses a choice between two wine glasses: one of “solid gold, wrought in the most exquisite patterns” and one of “crystal-clear glass.” “Now the man who first chose glass instead of clay or metal to hold his wine was a “modernist” in the sense in which I am going to use that term. That is, the first he asked of this particular object was not “How should it look?” but “What must it do?” and to that extent all good typography is modernist.” Throughout the essay, Warde argues for the discipline and humility required to create quietly set, “transparent” book pages.
Assignment 2 : Investigating Type Styles The assignment was to locate common typographic elements in the world today and then to identify the certain characteristics that define one typeface from another.
Type Styles These are typographic examples of the characteristics by which we organize type into families and eventually typefaces.
Type Style: Black Letter
Black letter was a type of type used in handwriting throughout Europe in the Middle Ages. It features uniform vertical strokes that end on the baseline, angular lines instead of smooth curves and circles, and the overlapping of convex forms. Black letter and roman were the dominant letter shapes of medieval typography. The only extant work known to have been printed by Johannes Gutenberg, the 42-line Bible (1450s), was set in black-letter type. Roman type largely superseded it in the Renaissance, though black letter persisted in Germany well into the 20th century. Today black letter is often used for diplomas, Christmas cards, and liturgical writings.
Common Typefaces: Lucida Blackletter Old English Wilhelm Klingspor Gotisch™
Roman is a type style used most widely in Western typography. Characterized by simple, unembellished shapes, roman was developed by 15th-century printers as an alternative to the heavy-bodied, spiky black letter script. Models for a new type that was easier to cut and read were found in the scriptoria, where scribes, probably at the urging of humanist scholars, were experimenting with a letter face they believed had been used in ancient Rome. Historians now trace its ancestry instead to the letter forms developed for Charlemagne’s decrees by Alcuin in the 9th century. Within a century, roman had superseded all other typefaces throughout Europe; the sole exception was Germany, where black letter continued to hold sway into the 20th century.
Common Typefaces: Times Roman Copperplate Garamond
Type Style: Roman
Type Style: Slab Serif
A Slab Serif is a type of serif font that evolved from the Modern style. The serifs are square and larger, bolder than serifs of previous type-styles. Considered a sub-classification of Modern in some type classification systems and its own class in other systems, Slab Serif is further divided into: Clarendon, Typewriter, Slab Serif or Geometrics (a separate sub-category of Slab Serif), and Fat Face (a fattened Didone/Modern style). Often called Egyptian fonts (reflected in such font names as Egyptian 505 and Egyptienne) or Western fonts (such as Wanted or Westside and Old Town), or Collegiate (large, blocky slab serifs), many Slabs are more suitable for use as headline or display fonts although there are several slab serifs that can work at smaller sizes including some of Typewriter styles.
Common Typefaces: Egyptian 505 Old Town Wanted Collegiate
Sans serif type is type which does not have serifs — the little extra strokes found at the end of main vertical and horizontal strokes of some letterforms — are called sans serif (without serif). Within sans serif there are five main classifications: Grotesque, Neo-Grotesque, Geometric, Humanist, and Informal. Typefaces within each classification usually share similarities in stroke thickness, weight, and the shapes of certain letterforms. Although there were some sans serif typefaces in the 1800s, the 1920’s Bauhaus design movement popularized the sans serif style. Although it’s impossible to make a blanket statement that applies to all uses of sans serif, some generalizations are that they are more modern, casual, crisp, bold, informal, friendly, and readable compared to serif fonts.
Common Typefaces: Helvetica Futura Gill Sans
Type Style: Sans Serif
Font Style: Script-Cursive
In typography, script fonts or type mimic historical or modern handwriting styles that look as if written with different styles of writing instruments from calligraphy pens to ballpoint pens. Typical characteristics of script type are: connected or nearly connected flowing letterforms and slanted, rounded characters. Formal script typefaces are generally neat, flowing, and formal in appearance. Informal script may be messy, playful, and look more like the varied cursive and print handwriting styles of today.
Common Typefaces: Brush Script Edwardian Script Commercial Script
Script fonts are fonts with extreme features such as swashes or exaggerated serifs, and any fonts designed to be used at larger than body copy sizes can be described as decorative type. Also referred to as display type, decorative fonts are typically used for titles and headlines and for small amounts of text in large sizes such as in greeting cards or posters. Some decorative type is hand drawn or may be created from digital type that has been manipulated in a font editor or graphics program to suit a specific purpose such as a newsletter nameplate or a logo.
Common Typefaces: Rosewood Papyrus Playbill
Type Style: Decorative-Display
Type Style: Vernacular
Vernacular type is derived from the literal hand of hand letter amateurs and professionals. This is the category that graffiti falls into. Each example is wildly different and mimics some script and decorative typefaces.
Typefaces These are typographic examples of specific typefaces. As opposed to the type styles, these are rigidly defined.
Typeface: Garamond the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG 0123456789 THE QUICK BROWN FOX
Garamond is a family of old-style serif typefaces derived from the work of Claude Garamond in the sixteenth century; most Garamond fonts have become renowned for their excellent readability, elegance, and character. You have read novels, poems, or pamphlets typeset in Garamond before without noticing, as it is selected by numerous publishers, authors, and individuals for the printing of their works.
Typeface: Helvetica
the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG 0123456789 THE QUICK BROWN FOX
The Helvetica typeface is one of the most famous and popular in the world. It’s been used for every typographic project imaginable, not just because it is on virtually every computer. Helvetica is ubiquitous because it works so well. The design embodies the concept that a typeface should absolutely support the reading process – that clear communication is the primary goal of typography.
Typeface: Copperplate the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG 0123456789 THE QUICK BROWN FOX
The Copperplate typeface shows an unusual combination of influences: the glyphs are reminiscent of stone carving, the wide horizontal axis is typical of Victorian display types, yet the result is far cleaner and leaves a crisp impression in letterpress or offset printing. The typeface is most often used in stationery, for social printing, and is classically seen acid-etched into glass on the doors of law offices, banks and restaurants.
Typeface: Optima the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. THE QUICK BROWN FOX JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG 0123456789 THE QUICK BROWN FOX
Though classified as a sans-serif, Optima has a subtle swelling at the terminals suggesting a glyphic serif. Optima’s design follows humanist lines; its italic is merely an oblique variant typical of realist sansserif typefaces such as Helvetica and Univers. Also unconventional for a contemporary sans, Optima’s capitals (like those of Palatino, Hans Eduard Meier’s Syntax and Carol Twombly’s Trajan) are directly derived from the classic Roman monumental capital model, reflecting a reverence for Roman capitals as an ideal form.
All typographic commentary compliments of http://desktoppub.about.com/
Assignment 3 : Type and Pictures The assignment was to incorporate typography within raster based images.
Microwave Microwave
Be a fish out of water.
Assignment 4 : Motion Graphics The assignment was to create a short motion graphic piece using Adobe After Effects.
Adobe After Effects gives you unprescedented control over vector graphics in a moving media context. Follow the QR Code below to view my motion graphics video.
Assignment 5 : Logo Design The assignment was to derive a binary vector logo from a contone raster image. The process should use a mixture of Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator.
The first part of the assignment involved reverting a color, full bit, image down to a binary, black and white, image. This was done in Adobe Photoshop using the selection tools to mask out the simplest form and then the threshold adjustment to determine the balance of black and white in the translation.
The resulting image from Photoshop was then translated into vector format utilizing the image trace tool and pen tool in Illustrator to define what elements of the logo are included and excluded. From there, the file can be incorporated in documents of any size. The business card design below is an example of that.
Contemporary Artist Representation 585.447.7790 gchase@chasestudios.com digital asset management fine printing gallery installation marketing buyer consultation
Assignment 6 : Poster Design The assignment was to create an 18X24 poster using design elements that reference contemporary poster design.
This poster design took a lot of inspiration from the propagandistic poster design during the World Wars. The message for the design simply speaks to an appreciation for architecture.
This poster design takes inspiration from a more contemporary form of poster design which incorporates a page-size full bleed image with contemporary typography in the form of a quote.
Assignment 7 : Video The assignment was to create a 1 minute long video with a message of some sort that can speak to a large audience.
This assignment stressed the importance of cut scenes and cinematography. I utilized both Adobe Premier Pro and After Effects. Follow the code below to watch my final video “H20�.
This concludes the compilation of assignments.
Notes: